Vampire Forensics

by Mark Collins Jenkins

  But it was Byron’s character that caused the most controversy. Much has been made of the Byronic hero—the man who lives by his own code outside the conventions of society, the figure that novelist Charlotte Brontë called the “corsair.” But to Polidori, Lord Byron resembled nothing so much as Lord Ruthven in the opening scenes of “The Vampyre” he may have been the talk of the ballrooms, but he was also cold, arrogant, haughty, cruel, and predacious—“a man entirely absorbed in himself.”

  Aubrey, the story’s narrator, accompanies Ruthven on a tour of Europe but grows disenchanted with him after witnessing his voracious sexual appetites and his cruel treatment of women. Ruthven has a cold, gray eye, while his skin exhibits a hue “which never gained a warmer tint, either from the blush of modesty, or from the strong emotion of passion.” Furthermore, all those to whom he gave money “inevitably found that there was a curse upon it, for they were all either led to the scaffold, or sunk to the lowest and most abject misery.”

  In Greece, Aubrey falls in love with Ianthe, a beautiful girl who is attacked in a remote place one night and killed by a vampire. Regaining consciousness after wrestling with the fiend, Aubrey beholds Ruthven sitting there. After further adventures in Greece, bandits ambush the two men, and Ruthven is killed—or perhaps not, for the moonlight seems to revive him.

  Ruthven next appears in London at an engagement party for Aubrey’s sister. Because he must feed at least once a year on the “life of a lovely female to prolong his existence for the ensuing months,” Ruthven preys upon Aubrey’s sister, which so enrages the young man that he dies of a stroke. In the closing line of the story, evil has emerged triumphant: “Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!”

  Soon after being published—under Byron’s name, which Polidori had not approved—in the April 1, 1819, issue of the New Monthly Magazine, “The Vampyre” was released as a book and became a best seller. Its initial connection with Byron was undoubtedly the reason; in Germany, for example, the poet Goethe supposedly pronounced it the greatest of all Byron’s works.

  Whether in England or on the Continent, the saga of the rapacious Ruthven was soon in readers’ hands everywhere. Within a year, it had been mounted on the stage as well. French writer Cyprien Bérard churned out a sequel, Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires (1820), which was attributed to the multitalented librarian and master of the literary fantasy, Charles Nodier. Though he had nothing to do with its genesis, Nodier proceeded to give Polidori’s tale a second life as a play, Le Vampire, though he switched the locale from Greece to Scotland. The play’s success incited a run on vampires in Paris, moving one critic to lament, “There is not a theatre in Paris without its Vampire!”

  Several seasons later, the fad was still going strong: An English correspondent declared that the vampire was being received with “rapturous applause at almost all the spectacles from the Odeon to the Porte St. Martin…. Where are the descendants of the Encyclopedists and the worshippers of the goddess Reason,” he asked, when Parisians were mad for “apparitions nocturnes” and “cadavres mobiles?”

  A young theater innovator named James Planché brought a version of the French play back to London. The Vampire, or the Bride of the Isles, opened in August 1820 at the Lyceum; it was given an incongruous Scottish setting, Planché wrote despairingly, only because the producer had “set his heart on Scotch music and dresses—the latter, by the way, were in stock.” Sensationalism, then as now, ruled the pens of copywriters; the playbill stated that vampires “are Spirits, deprived of all Hope of Futurity, by the Crimes committed in their Mortal State” but nevertheless are allowed to exert “Supernatural Powers of Fascination.” They cannot be destroyed, it asserted, if they kill one female each year—“whom they are first compelled to marry.” (That proviso clearly didn’t stick.) Planché, who invented a “vampire trap” that allowed the fiend to vanish and reappear onstage in startling fashion, got it right on his second attempt a few years later, when he set a revised version of The Vampire in Wallachia, using Magyar costumes.

  The literary vampire had been loosed upon the world, but Polidori did not live to see its success. He died in August 1821, only 26 years old, and was buried in the consecrated ground of London’s St. Pancras churchyard. The truth of his demise—that he had poisoned himself in despair over gambling debts—was covered up, for in 1821, an Anglo-Saxon law grimly matching Polidori’s fevered imagination still remained on the books: It stipulated that a suicide must be buried at a crossroads, with a stake through his heart. The law was repealed two years later.

  Two others who shared those hours in the Villa Diodati that stormy summer of 1816 soon followed Polidori to the grave. In July 1822, Percy Shelley drowned in a sailing accident off the coast of Italy. His body was cremated on a makeshift pyre on the beach where it had washed up—a consummation common among the pagan Greeks the poet had so admired.

  Not long after the torch was applied, eyewitness Trelawny recalled, the carcass cracked open; where the skull rested on the red-hot iron bars, the “brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time.” When the flames subsided, there remained only ashes, some bone fragments—and Shelley’s heart, somehow undamaged. “In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace,” Trelawny recalled, “my hand was severely burnt….”

  Less than two years later, in April 1824, Lord Byron died in Greece, where he had journeyed to fight in the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Turks. Byron apparently succumbed to a fever—if he wasn’t in fact bled to death by overzealous physicians—in swampy Missolinghi, just south of the Albanian border.

  Mary Shelley would die of a brain tumor in 1851, at the age of 53. As her son sifted through her effects, he found not only locks of her dead children’s hair but also a copy of Percy Shelley’s Adonais, an elegy for the poet John Keats, who had likewise died young (though of tuberculosis). One page of the elegy was folded around a silk bag, which, when opened, contained some ashes—and a desiccated human heart.

  BY HOOK OR BY CROOK

  Such descriptions and mementos were not unusual in the 19th century, an era of fascination with death. People would hold picnics in such imposing cemeteries as Père Lachaise in Paris—before visiting the morgue, one hopes. Until a halt was put to the practice in 1905, thousands of people filed through the viewing gallery of that Paris morgue each year, gaping at the ever-changing display of corpses in much the same way they gazed into the new department-store windows a few blocks away. It was a social occasion, a place to take one’s girl.

  A deep tremor of unease, however, often rattled this apparent aplomb. Young David Copperfield senses it in Dickens’s novel of that name: So frightened is David by the biblical story of Lazarus returning from the dead that the adults are “obliged to take me out of bed, and show me the quiet churchyard out of the bedroom window, with the dead all lying in their graves at rest, below the solemn moon.”

  Such a tranquil aspect, though, can mask a restless graveyard. Horrible things might be going on down there. Stories of bodies found in their coffins arched, contorted, turned prone, their shrouds ripped, or otherwise wrenched into positions of inconceivable agony fed one of the morbid phobias of the age: the obsessive terror of premature burial.

  By the 19th century, it was widely believed that many people fell into catalepsies or comas—one doctor posited a “death trance”—in which their vital functions were somehow suspended without incurring death. Such people appeared quite dead, of course—the ear could detect no heartbeat, the finger felt no pulse, the mirror held below their nostrils betrayed not a trace of breath—and so they were promptly buried. Yet, they still might revive in the grave, a thought so horrible that most people could not bear to imagine it.

  So before being committed to the coffin, in an age before embalming was widespread, bodies were subjected to actual tortures—fingers were dislocated, feet were burned—to provoke a response. Sometimes they were just parked som
eplace and left—the Duke of Wellington remained unburied for two months—until the sure signs of decomposition began to show. Nevertheless, instances piled on instances of last-minute revivals at the graveyard gate, of corpses sitting up in their coffins and looking wonderingly about them. At a time when graves were often only 18 inches deep—and sometimes only six or eight—it was not hard to believe that someone might claw his way out and appear, like Madeline Usher in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” a bloody, haggard, shrouded figure returned from the dead.

  Those with a morbid dread of premature burial could obtain all kinds of ingenious survival devices with which to outfit one’s final home. Pipes leading aboveground might be fixed to the coffin so that its inmate would not suffocate should he awaken. Or “Bateson’s Belfry”—a bell attached to the coffin—could be installed, with its cord thoughtfully placed in the corpse’s hand so that he might give it a pull and ring for assistance. An inexpensive measure was to enclose a shovel and crowbar inside the coffin.

  Some people opted to have their hearts cut out—the theory being that whatever can’t revive you on the operating table certainly won’t wake you in the grave. Chopin, for example, was so terrified of premature burial that he had his heart removed; it was preserved in alcohol (rumored to be cognac) and interred in the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw.

  The idea of premature burial prefigured the larger idea of reanimated corpses, and for that reason, it was inevitably invoked as an explanation for vampirism. Premature burial was also seized upon as the rationale for why some bodies found in graves were better preserved than others: They had somehow remained alive down there. The atrocious concept also came in handy for explaining the blood found in coffins: The victim, buried alive, had understandably severed his veins and arteries in a frantic attempt to claw his way out, finally exsanguinating himself. Indeed, the whole vampire legend might be based on dim memories of living people who had actually returned from the grave. That seemed the rational explanation, for as an 1847 article in Blackwoods magazine put it, “no ghastlier terror can there be than the accredited apprehension of Vampirism.”

  It didn’t help matters, though, if the bodies were missing altogether.

  “As the dark nights of the late autumn came on,” wrote Victorian author Thomas Frost of the early years of the 19th century, “the fears of the timid and nervous were doubled, and persons who lived in lonely places, or in the ill-lighted parts of towns, became afraid to leave their houses after nightfall.” They were afraid not of goblins, but of body snatchers.

  With the growth of medical schools, and in an era before refrigeration, came the need for a constant supply of fresh corpses for dissection. In England, the bodies of executed criminals had traditionally filled this need. After the British penal code was reformed at the turn of the 19th century, however, drastically curtailing capital punishment, that source effectively dried up. The anatomists then quietly circulated word that they would pay for fresh corpses, no questions asked. Body snatchers, known by the grimly ironic sobriquet of “resurrectionists,” met the new demand.

  Bribing cemetery watchmen and wielding quiet wooden spades, they worked in the dead of night. They dug only at the head of a grave and left most of the dirt intact. Using a crowbar, they would snap off the coffin lid, drag out the corpse by hook or rope, strip it of its cerements, sack it, carry it to a waiting hackney coach, and trundle it to the dissecting rooms. Ghoulish, yes, but the work was profitable: A leading resurrectionist once received £144 for 12 subjects in a single night. One body snatcher, when he in turn entered the graveyard (hopefully for good), left his family nearly £6,000.

  The fresher the corpse, the better the pay. This led to burking — the murderous practice of clapping a pitch plaster over a victim’s nose and mouth, ensuring a speedy death that left few or no signs of the violence responsible. It also produced the freshest corpse possible. Burking was named for William Burke, an Irish ne’er-do-well who, between 1827 and 1828, with his accomplice William Hare, murdered 16 people in Scotland and sold their bodies to an esteemed Edinburgh anatomist, Dr. Robert Knox. The doctor escaped prosecution, Hare turned King’s evidence, and Burke was hanged for the crimes in 1829. In a pitiless twist of lex talionis, Burke’s body was then dissected at the University of Edinburgh, and his skin was made into pocketbooks and other macabre trophies. His skeleton still hangs in the college’s medical school today.

  Horrors such as these led to the 1832 Anatomy Act, which expanded the legal options for obtaining cadavers. Body snatching remained a problem, though a lessening one, throughout the century.

  In Canada, meanwhile, resurrectionists didn’t even have to dirty their hands; they simply filched corpses from mausoleums in winter, where they had been stacked up to await the spring thaw. In the United States, body snatchers were equally contemptuous of propriety: After a corpse was stolen from the grave next to that of Ohio congressman John Scott Harrison in 1878—as the son of President William Henry Harrison and the father of President Benjamin Harrison, John lay in a sealed and guarded brick vault—a vigorous search was launched for the missing body. The seekers never found the ordinary citizen, but to their shock, they discovered a loftier cadaver instead: Congressman John Harrison’s body had been suspended from a rope beneath a trap door inside the Medical College of Ohio. Soon afterward, a letter writer to the Zanesville (Ohio) Daily Courier opined:

  …our ghouls are no imaginary demons. They walk about among us in broadcloth and kid gloves; physicians and surgeons, with lawyers to defend them, when caught at their obscene work; nice young men, who clerk in stores during the day, take their girls to places of amusement in the evening, and then replenish their depleted pockets by invading the cemeteries, putting hooks through the jaws of our deceased friends, sacking and carting away the bodies, and selling them to Professors of Anatomy for $25.00 a piece!

  Grave robbing, though, is as old as burial itself. Long before there were professors of anatomy, there were folk healers. In an 1880 issue of the London Daily Mail, there appeared a notice about a “strange and horrible Wendish superstition, which has been handed down from the Pagan ancestors of the Prussians.” The Wends were Slavs living among the Germans of Thuringia, where grave robbing was punishable by life imprisonment:

  It is commonly believed among the poorer peasantry of Wendish extraction that several paramount medicinal virtues and magical charms are seated in the heart or liver of a dead maiden or infant of tender years, and that these organs, brewed with certain herbs into a beverage, will cure diseases or inspire the passion of love in their consumers. The practical result of this barbarous belief is the constantly recurrent violation of the grave’s sanctity, and the mutilation of the corpses secretly disinterred from the consecrated ground in which they have been laid to rest. Last week two graves in the new cemetery of Weissensee were broken open during the night, and the coffins contained in them forced, and the bodies of an unmarried girl and a male infant discovered next morning by the guardians of the burial-ground, mangled in the most revolting manner, the cavity of the chest in both cases having been completely emptied of its contents.

  BURY ME DEEP

  In the mid-1840s, those disinclined to pay 12 pence for each new installment of Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son could opt for a far cheaper (in all senses of that word) reading experience. The penny dreadful had arrived, and with it a series of luridly compelling titles: Wagner the Were-Wolf; The Skeleton Clutch, or the Goblet of Gore; Sawney Bean, the Man-Eater of Midlothian; The Maniac Father, or the Victim of Seduction; and so on, all vying to dethrone the penny-dreadful king: the 220 chapters on 868 double-columned pages of Varney the Vampyre; or, The Feast of Blood, once described by literary critic James Twitchell as among the “most redundant, exorbitant, digressive, thrilling, tedious, and fantastic works ever written.”

  From the outset, Varney is vampire-as-stage-villain. As he bends over the sleeping “fair Flora” Bannerworth, his face is “perfectly white�
��perfectly bloodless”:

  The eyes look like polished tin; the lips are drawn back, and the principal feature next to those dreadful eyes is the teeth—the fearful looking teeth—projecting like those of some wild animal, hideously, glaringly white, and fang-like…He drags her head to the bed’s edge. He forces it back by the long hair still entwined in his grasp. With a plunge he seizes her neck in his fang-like teeth—a gush of blood, and a hideous sucking noise follows. The girl has swooned, and the vampyre is at his hideous repast!

  On it goes like that—episode piled upon unbelievable episode—as the cadaverous, polite, and exceedingly well-spoken Sir Francis Varney preys on Sir Marmaduke Bannerworth’s family at Bannerworth Hall or is chased over the countryside by enraged mobs. But Varney cannot be killed. Whenever he is cornered or on the verge of expiring, a few moonbeams suffice to revive him—leading to yet more hairbreadth escapes from other ravening mobs: “How frightful is the existence of Varney the Vampyre!”

  How confusing, too: At one juncture, Varney is said to have lived in the reign of King Henry IV (1399–1413). Another tale mentions that he died during the Commonwealth (1649–1660), having betrayed a royalist to Oliver Cromwell. Yet a third reveals that Varney was originally hanged as a felon, then revived by galvanism, like Frankenstein’s monster. Or perhaps it was all of the above. From chapter to hastily penned chapter, the author or authors of the Varney yarns could not be troubled to get their story straight. And readers didn’t seem to care.